I spent a month with this book, and I feel that I will spend many many more remembering and missing it. Set in the late 14th century in Greenland, Smiley’s saga follows the inhabitants, namely the Gunnarsson family into the early 15th century as they toil to survive in a landscape that, though since time immemorial has gone through cycles of change, begins to alter in shapes of shadow and darker shadows that will test the Greenlanders’ will. The Christian faith, hope and danger are brought to them in turns by ships from a world whose distance emphasizes the isolation of their country, and the mingling of the outside and the inside of their laws and tendencies pans out in a myriad of abundance and demise.

It’s been a while since I’ve been so in awe of the mechanics of a book. Through the almost incantatory rhythm that Smiley implements, the reader can’t resist being pulled into the characters’ lives, as if drawn to some kind of bewitching, beautiful music. Following “the terse style of a Norse saga” (NY Times review) the book reads as if the reader’s soaring above and looking down from a bird’s eye view, and yet manages to transfer an intimacy for the characters - one that is composed of both the sweeping life events and quotidian details of seal hunts, cheese-making and gossip. Love, death, separation, brutality, friendship, the question of salvation: if there’s a novel that encompasses the essence of Life, in all its discord and beauty, surely The Greenlanders is it. The power of the book I discovered not when I was with it, but when I was away from it, for its chronicles never diminished in my mind even as I opened other books and got on with my life. I’ve never teared up so many times while reading, never gasped and heard the chink of my breaking heart so often, never felt more distinctly how minuscule and yet honorable humankind’s passage through time is. (whoops, I feel myself swelling with emotion again thinking of this book, someone help me)